WORLD.OS - Articles and Newsletter

Why Europe’s inherited view of Africa makes it overlook the partners it increasingly needs During a slow morning in the office I have a conversation with my colleague about why our work on implementing modern digital solutions in Cameroon is not easily recognized as an opportunity to contribute to Europe’s own digital sovereignty. Many people working in European embassies, international cooperation or German public administrations can readily imagine European technology bei

I have written extensively about industrial policy in recent months. Regular readers will know the broader argument: in what I have called the geoeconomic decade, economic policy and international cooperation are increasingly being reorganised around economic security, strategic industries and more resilient supply chains. Governments are no longer concerned primarily with efficiency and growth. They are focusing on where essential products are manufactured, who controls crit

Development cooperation is being defunded. Multilateral institutions are under pressure. Across Europe and North America, governments are reducing aid budgets, questioning traditional forms of international engagement, and increasingly prioritizing domestic economic and security concerns. At first sight, this appears to signal a retreat from international cooperation. I believe the opposite is happening. A new form of international cooperation is emerging. It is not yet fully

Europe’s Sovereign Tech Package will still fall short without international partnerships The European Union’s new Sovereign Tech Package deserves to be welcomed. For many years, Europe’s digital policy was defined primarily by its ability to regulate technologies developed elsewhere. The EU became an influential rule-maker, but remained far less successful at building the companies on which the digital economy increasingly depends. The Sovereign Tech Package is the attempt to

A short introduction to Economic Security In my previous newsletter, I argued that development cooperation and trade liberalization, as the central approaches to international cooperation, may increasingly be replaced by a growing focus on economic security. It was therefore to no surprise that Jozef Sikela, Commissioner of EU’s DG INTPA (EU’s “Ministry” for Development Cooperation officially the Directorate-General for International Partnerships) posted after the Foreign Aff

This weekend, I once again found myself trying to explain what I do for a living. I answered that I work in international cooperation. Then came the usual shortcut: development cooperation. The term created recognition. It also created confusion. The image people had in mind bore little resemblance to my actual work. They imagined aid projects, perhaps humanitarian assistance. Yet my day-to-day work revolves around digital health systems and software implementation. It is rar

Recently, I found myself once again discussing the 2025 article in Foreign Policy Magazine “The End of Development”. It is a debate that has accompanied international cooperation for decades and that usually revolves around dependency, effectiveness, paternalism and donor fatigue. What struck me during these discussions was something simple: I never felt comfortable with the concept of “development” in the first place and I never wanted to work in “aid.” What drew me into thi

What if the WTO is no longer the place where global trade is decided? In March 2026, trade ministers will gather in Yaoundé to negotiate the future of the multilateral trading system. But the real decisions about trade are already being made elsewhere—in industrial subsidies, in supply chain alliances, in technology partnerships, and in the quiet reconfiguration of global production networks. A System Under Pressure – And a Moment of Strategic Choice The 14th Ministerial Conf